DaVita Website Privacy Policy

Effective August 3, 2016

Thank you for visiting DaVita’s websites. We work hard to keep the sites and on-line tools current and hope that you find the information available here to be highly useful.

Except as expressly stated otherwise on a website, we make these sites available for the purpose of providing useful information to the general public and not for the purpose of providing healthcare services. Certain sites offer on-line, self-help and/or educational tools and require users to register for a myDaVita (https://www.davita.com/register) account or similar on-line account. None of these sites are intended to serve as vehicles for providing medical advice or healthcare services. Please consult your physician regarding your specific diagnosis, treatment, diet, and health questions. If you are experiencing an urgent medical condition, call 9-1-1.

When you use a website owned by DaVita or one of its affiliates (DaVita), we may ask you to provide us with certain personally identifiable information, including, but not limited to, your name, photo, address, date of birth, zip code, phone number and email address (Personal Information), and we may collect information about your use of our sites or your other on-line activities. We may also obtain Personal Information when you engage in email, text or other communications with us. In keeping with the general informational purpose of these sites and the related communications, we collect Personal Information from you as an on-line consumer and not as a patient of DaVita.This Privacy Policy describes how DaVita handles Personal Information. By contrast, any information we may collect when we provide healthcare services to our patients (Health Information) is governed by a separate Notice of Privacy Practices that will be provided to any DaVita patient in the course of delivering healthcare services.

This Privacy Policy tells you what information we collect, how we protect it, your relationship with our websites, and what choices you have regarding your information. This Privacy Policy is a part of, and is governed by, DaVita’s Terms of Use. It is important that you carefully read both this Privacy Policy and DaVita’s Terms of Use. By accessing or using a DaVita site and voluntarily providing us with your Personal Information, you are consenting to our use and disclosure of your Personal Information in accordance with the terms of this Privacy Policy.

Personal Information DaVita Collects and How We Use It

You are not required to provide any Personal Information to use some of our sites. However, other sites -- including those that have tools enabling you to get more personalized information -- require you to create an account or register in order to access a particular tool. For example, by creating a myDaVita account (which will require you to provide certain Personal Information), you will gain access to a variety of specialized information. Do not share any information with us that you wish to remain private. You are responsible for ensuring the accuracy of the information you submit to DaVita. The submission of inaccurate information will affect the information you receive through our websites (which, again, does not constitute medical advice) and may impair our ability to contact you as described in this Privacy Policy. For example, you should make sure your email address is current because that is how you may receive information.

You will have the opportunity to designate whether to make your profile public or keep it private, and you may change your designation, or change your profile data at any time. Please note that public profiles are often indexed and cached by Internet search engines. Some personal profile information will be visible to other community members and could be made public when you make postings, such as comments to a forum or reviews of recipes. Whether you provide us with your Personal Information or create a public profile is entirely up to you.

You may change or delete your Personal Information or account settings by logging into your account (for myDaVita: https://www.davita.com/mydavita/account-settings.) To have your account deleted, contact us using the information in the Questions, Complaints and Contacts section below.

After you have created your account, you may choose to use interactive content, tools, and services that may request additional information from you. Using these tools and providing additional information is strictly voluntary.

We collect Personal Information when you register for an account, update your profile, or use certain interactive services. We use the Personal Information that you provide in various ways, including responding to your questions, providing you with the specific services you select, showing you website content, including advertisements, and sending you emails that may be of interest to you. If you have designated your profile to be public, DaVita may use and display your information and photos in other DaVita websites and materials.

DaVita may transfer your Personal Information to an affiliate, subsidiary or successor to the business to which such information is associated. DaVita obtains various types of services, such as information technology, email delivery and data analysis, from its affiliates, subsidiaries, and other trusted business partners. DaVita may share your Personal Information with these vendors to enable them to deliver services to DaVita. Finally, DaVita may also share your Personal Information with third-parties for their direct marketing purposes, provided that you have consented to such sharing.

Anonymous Information and Tracking Technologies

When you use our websites, we may automatically collect certain information, such as where you browse within the sites, traffic and location data, and information about the computer and Internet connection. This information helps us administer the sites and provide a better user experience, and we may connect this information to Personal Information that you provide to us or we collect from other sources.

Our websites may use cookies and other tracking technologies to identify users who have previously used our sites so that the user is recognized upon returning. A cookie is a piece of data stored on the user's hard drive containing information about the user. If you reject the cookie, you may still use our sites but some of the features of the sites may not work as intended. A cookie may be placed on your hard drive by us or by our business partners. Most Internet browsers offer instructions in the "Help" section of the toolbar on how to reset your browser to disallow cookies.

The sites may contain transparent GIF files (also known as "web beacons," "action tags," or "pixel tags") or use other technologies to help manage on-line advertising. These GIF files are used to recognize when a user views a web page or opens an email. This information enables DaVita to learn which emails and advertisements bring users to our sites.

To help manage our advertising and sites, we may use third-party products such as AdSense, AdWords, Google Analytics, a range of DoubleClick-branded services, and IBM Marketing Cloud. When you visit a page that uses one of these products, either on our sites or one of our partners’ sites, various cookies may be sent to your browser. These may be sent from multiple different domains. These cookies enable DaVita to use other services in conjunction with third-party vendors (such as ad measurement, ad delivery, or reporting services) and these third-party services may send their own cookies to your browser and collect information about your use of our sites, including your IP address. More information on, for example, Google services can be found at www.google.com/policies/privacy/partners/.

Sometimes, when you click on a link or an advertisement on our sites, your browser may be momentarily redirected to the website of a third-party, which, acting at the request of DaVita, notes or "counts" your response to the site before re-directing your browser to the link you selected. This redirection process may not be apparent to you. We use this process for counting overall responses.

Do Not Track Signals

Some web browsers may transmit “do not track” signals to websites with which the browser communicates. Our sites do not currently respond to these “do not track” signals.

How We Protect Personal Information

DaVita’s sites incorporate safeguards to help protect the security and privacy of Personal Information. DaVita employs certain procedural and technological security measures designed to protect your Personal Information from unauthorized access and disclosure. We may use encryption, secure sockets layer (SSL) technology, internal restrictions, risk management programs, or other security measures. However, no security system is impenetrable, and transmission of information over the Internet is not completely secure. While we take steps to protect your Personal Information, we cannot guarantee its privacy or security.

DaVita may share Personal Information in response to a court order, subpoena, search warrant, law, or regulation. We may cooperate with law enforcement in investigating and prosecuting activities that are illegal, violate our rules, or may be harmful to other visitors.

Newsletters, Email and Text Messages

When you register for an account or certain other actions on a DaVita website, you may be given the option of receiving recurring informational/promotional newsletters or other emails from DaVita or our business partners. In order for you to subscribe to these emails, we will ask for your contact information. You can unsubscribe from DaVita emails at any time by simply following the directions included at the bottom of each email or by editing the information you entered when you registered (for myDaVita, go to https://www.davita.com/mydavita/account-settings.)

Please note that if you do unsubscribe from receiving marketing-related emails from us, we may still need to send you important administrative messages. You cannot opt-out from receiving these administrative messages.

You can opt-out of text messages to which you have subscribed. The simplest way to opt-out of receiving text messages is to reply “Stop” to any text message you receive from us. We will implement your request as soon as reasonably practical but no later than 30 days from the date of such request.

If you have difficulties with our newsletters, emails or texts that you cannot address as described above, please see the contact information in the “Questions, Complaints and Contacts” section below and let us know about your issue.

Other Information Sent to DaVita

Other than Personal Information to which this Privacy Policy pertains, any content, business information, ideas, concepts, or inventions that you send to DaVita by email or other electronic means may be publicly disclosed and used by DaVita. If you want to keep content or business information, ideas, concepts, or inventions private or proprietary, do not send them to DaVita. We try to answer every email within five (5) business days, but are not always able to do so.

Email-a-Page

If you use our “Email-a-Page” service to tell another person about our sites, we will ask you for your name and email address and your friend's email address. We will automatically send your friend a one-time email inviting him or her to visit the sites using your name and email address as the "from" email address. By using this functionality, you are telling us that you are entitled to use and provide us with your friend’s name and email address. We will only use the information you provide to send the email you request.

Communities, Blogs, and Other Public Forums

DaVita’s sites may feature public forums or other community areas where users with similar interests or medical conditions can share information. We may also offer moderated on-line discussions. Such communities and discussions are for informational purposes only and do not constitute medical advice. These communities and discussions are open to the public and should not be considered private.

Any information you choose to share in our on-line communities and discussions is, by design, open to the public and is not private; therefore, you should think carefully before sharing any Personal Information or information about your health. What you share can be seen, disclosed to, or collected by third-parties and may be used by others in ways we cannot control or predict, including to contact you for purposes you have not authorized.

Linking

As a resource to users of our sites, DaVita may provide links to other unaffiliated websites. DaVita, however, cannot guarantee the policies or standards used by such third-party websites. DaVita does not endorse, nor is it responsible for, the content of, or the privacy practices employed by, any non-DaVita websites. If you link to a third-party website from a DaVita site, information you provide on the third-party website is not subject to this Privacy Policy or any other DaVita policy. You should consult the privacy policies of each website you visit.

Social Media

DaVita’s sites may use social media plugins to enable you to easily share information with others. When you visit a website, the operator of the social plugin can place a cookie on your computer enabling that operator to recognize individuals who have previously visited our sites. If you are logged into the social media website while browsing our sites, the social plugins allow that social media website to receive information that you have visited our sites. The social plugins also allow the social media website to share information about your activities when using our sites with other users of their social media website. DaVita does not control any of the content from the social media plugins. For more information about plugins from other social media websites you should refer to those websites' privacy policies.

DaVita reserves the right to edit or remove any post or user for any reason or no reason. For example, we may edit comments for content, remove off-topic contributions, delete offensive material, block offensive contributors, and delete suspected spam or non-complying content from any of our sites, such as forums, blogs, discussions or other communities, or social media sites.

Child Privacy

DaVita’s sites are intended for adults age 18 and older, and are not intended to attract children. DaVita will not knowingly collect Personal Information from any person we actually know to be under 13 years old. If you are under the age of 13, do not use the sites or provide any information through the sites.

Access and Correction

You may correct, amend, or delete the Personal Information that we have in a registered account by logging into your account (for myDaVita go to https://www.davita.com/mydavita/account-settings). To delete your account or for other issues, use the contact information in the “Questions, Complaints and Contacts” section below.

Your California Privacy Rights

California Civil Code Section 1798.83, entitles California customers to request information relating to whether a business has disclosed Personal Information to any third-parties for the third-parties’ direct marketing purposes. As explained elsewhere in this Privacy Policy, DaVita will not sell or transfer your Personal Information to third-party companies for their direct marketing purposes without your consent. California customers who wish to request further information about our compliance with this statute or who have questions may contact us as described in the “Questions, Complaints and Contacts” section below.

Changes to Privacy Policy

DaVita reserves the right to change this Privacy Policy at any time without notice, so check back frequently to review our current privacy practices. Any changes we make to this Privacy Policy will be effective for any information we already have about you. Your continued use of, or registration with, the sites means that you accept and agree to the current Privacy Policy.

Questions, Complaints and Contacts

If you have a question about DaVita’s Privacy Policy, wish to make a complaint, or believe that your rights under this Privacy Policy may have been violated, you may contact us by clicking on the contact us link or by using the information below.

This site is for informational purposes only and is not intended to be a substitute for medical advice from a physicians.
Please check with a physician if you need a diagnosis and/or for treatments as well as information regarding your specific condition. If you are experiencing urgent medical conditions, call 9-1-1